Bombers of Paris-area kosher store still at large

MARSEILLE, France (JTA) — French authorities have indicted seven suspects in the recent bombing of a kosher store near Paris but have not caught those who hurled the bomb, a Paris prosecutor said.

Francois Molins of the Paris public prosecutor’s office said on Saturday that seven suspects have been indicted for belonging to a terrorist association and that two of them will be tried for complicity in attempted murder.

Molins has said the men belonged to “an extremely dangerous terrorist, Jihadist cell” which perpetrated the Sept. 19 bombing of a kosher supermarket in Sarcelles, a northern suburb of Paris.

Two men wearing masks hurled a self-made explosive device into the crowded store at noon. One man sustained minor injuries in the explosion. Last week French authorities discovered a cache of weapons and explosives near Paris, which they believe belonged to the terrorist cell.

On Oct. 6 and Oct. 7, French anti-terror police arrested 12 suspects in connection with the attack in a series of raids in several French cities. In one raid, in Strasbourg, police shot and killed Jérémie Louis-Sidney, 33, after he fired on officers at his apartment building.

On Sunday, the weekly Journal du Dimanche quoted Molins as saying: “We have identified the planners of this attack, we know Louis-Sidney handled the explosive device, but we are missing the two people who actually threw it in.”

He is quoted as adding: “According to the testimonies, the videos from the security cameras and other materials from the investigation, the two young men — one black and the other white — who threw in the device are at large.”

There is “a risk,” he said, that not all the culprits “would be identified beyond doubt.”

Such investigations, he added "always present the same problem: You either keep pulling on the thread until you’ve undone the whole yarn ball, or you cut the thread. With a terrorist network, and considering how dangerous this one was, we could not afford to wait.”

Richard Prasquier, the president of CRIF, the umbrella group representing French Jewish communities, has praised French authorities for the "quick action" in pursuing the perpetrators of the attack.